I don't believe the court is required to find a placement for Chris if he's not convicted or plead out. So running out the clock like that and then tossing him out the door onto the streets is about the cruelest thing they could do to him.
Of course they would soon find him arrested again and right back in their laps (well, not Heilberg), so I doubt that's their intent.
I can all but guarantee they're looking for somewhere to stuff him that's far, far away from Greene County. Best of luck to them.
If they release him without charges, they also can't place any restrictions on him until he does something new to create problems. This pretty much guarantees him immediately trying to go back to 14BC, regardless of who is living there or who owns it.
If the house still belongs to the Chandlers, he's free to move back in, even if Barb is still there. (The EPO was only for one week and thus expired long, long ago, and you can't just keep granting EPOs repeatedly, they have to be replaced by a restraining order with the consent of the protected individual) If the house is sold, then he'll probably try to go in anyway. After all, nobody told him he can't. Neither situation would be good for Greene County and they'd probably wind up having him right back in court.
So yeah, I agree, they're looking for someplace to stuff him, and they'll need some sort of conviction to do it. If they release him without charges he's free to just walk out of the jail. If it's based on a plea deal they can "release" him into a tard home far across the state, where he'll be free to try to get back to 14BC but probably too inept and lazy to do so, and more importantly have a stern warning that he'll be immediately arrested again if he tries.
If Chris refuses a plea bargain they'll pretty much be forced to throw the book at him and then the Prisonchu saga begins. Even if Heilberg pulls off a miracle and gets Chris off the incest charges at trial due to insufficient evidence, a jury would still probably go for the misdemeanor EPO violation, and they'd still be free to ship Chris off to be "released" to a tard home far from Ruckersville.
Incompetent? Maybe. Chris's letters have been the inane, ramblings of retard with the IQ of a shovel but they aren't exactly Manson rant levels of dangerous, let alone incompetent.
You don't have to be dangerous to be incompetent. You don't have to be insane or incapacitated to be incompetent. You just have to be so nonfunctional that you can't assist in your own defense. Nobody plays this up intentionally for long, as it basically just means you stay in a treatment facility indefinitely until you have recovered, but it's still an attorney's job to report it so that their client does not get fucked in court (and the prosecution is inclined to accept it to avoid the risk of a mistrial being declared on appeal).
Chris is now coming off as crazy enough that you could conceivably argue that he cannot assist in his own defense.
Though by Virginia law, time spent in state mental care still counts as time served.
I don't think this is likely, but if we get more months of radio silence from Chris, one possible scenario is he's been refusing plea deals and Heilberg sent him off for treatment, with him getting out of it just in time to accept a 1-year plea deal.
Is there any way to dig up other cases that have been continued this long in Virginia for some sort of precedent? Would probably give a good perspective though I don't know how easy that would be to find.
Sure, lots of cases have been continued this long, including previous Chris cases. Chris' situation is only unusual in the nature of the charges and that he's being held in jail, but hasn't had a plea bargain, and the case is having a 6 month continuance while staying in J&DR court.
Usually when you are in jail you don't just willingly sit there for 6 months without a hearing. In places where it happens due to congested courts (like in New York City) that's usually considered a *bad* thing and defendants fight to get their dates moved up.
Normally what would happen if you were stuck in jail for a potential felony, but with the possibility of a misdemeanor deal, your attorney would not let you sit in jail any longer than necessary, but open to a decent plea deal. If the prosecution doesn't play ball, you push it toward a trial to move the negotiations along (since neither side wants a trial). Eventually somebody blinks before the trial starts.
You only drag things out for a long time if there's something you want to go stale. In this case I suppose there could be some advantage to Barb dying or becoming more forgetful, but that could easily go the other way and hurt Chris' case. I highly doubt Heilberg is stalling for that reason.
To bring back another Chris case comparison, let's go to the Snyder case. In this case Chris was out on bail, so stalling was less painful. The initial stalling was for a good 4 months. As I understand it, the prosecution was trying to get Chris and Barb to take the felony hit and run and Barb's assaulting a police officer (both wobblers) as a misdemeanor plea bargain, but Barb was determined to get Rob Bell to get them off on all charges. Eventually the prosecutor forced the issue and sent it to Circuit Court, where at the last minute Bell was finally able to convince Barb that it was the best deal they were going to get, and she wound up taking the misdemeanor plea deal anyway, wasting the Circuit Court's time. This process took about a year.
In that case, the stalling didn't cost Barb and Chris any jail time (other than the one night when they were arrested), but it did cost them all of their inheritance from Bob. I assume it was fairly frustrating for Rob Bell, but at least he was getting paid well.
If Barb and Chris had instead been stuck in jail, Bell would have called them crazy for willfully pushing the issue like that.
